Site Streamer // Sometimes, you just want to stream!

Site Streamer

Sometimes...you just want to stream

The other day, I wanted to listen to the songs available for download from a band's site but downloading them, then adding to my media player seemed like to much work. Strange, because I usually prefer to download -- eventually the tracks end up on my phone and I listen to them in my car. Today, I wanted to listen to them now and the process of downloading each, naming appropriately, then listening to all seemed daunting.

I should develop a website to do this for me!

Instead of spending a few minutes to work this out myself, I decided the more time-effective solution was to spend hours developing a website to do it for me. Of course!

Luckily, I already had the building blocks: 1) [bandcamp downloader] a site that parsed bandcamp pages and made the songs available for download, naming them appropriately and 2) [jPlaylister] a site that creates jPlayer playlists from a local folder's contents.

It wasn't that bad, but spending the time to polish up the site enough for public use added another month of wait due to my busy schedule and recently rekindled gaming habit (a night or two a week for a couple of hours -- nothing serious).

Hello, World!

Meet Site Streamer. A site you can use to stream content from a place which normally just allows standard linked downloads.

You visit the site, paste in a website which has plainly linked downloadable (mp3, currently) audio content, and enjoy the stream. Hope this is convenient for someone!

Music Player / Music Management Software

Warning

This is more of a rant than a legitimate article.

Winamp is old(/paid software sucks) -- Let's get a replacement

what do you use for music management / playback? i used Winamp (winaMP3) for music playing/management until recently, and finally decided to switch (it felt really old). however, it is my reference/benchmark. i want any replacement to do what it did for me (watch multiple folders, playlists, global hotkeys) and more (not feel so dated, be less of a resource hog, natively scrobble to last.fm, allow mass tagging). those are reasonable expectations, right?

Songbird

i switched to Songbird bc i prefer programs that aren't 'free' with a separate 'paid version,' when possible. it had some good reviews/recommendations and lots of neat features...the website was well done. however, it has a horrible UI when it comes to a 'now playing' section // interactive playlist. apparently, this has been a problem for 4 years or so. until it gets fixed, i decided to look elsewhere since that is such a big part of my listen-flow.

foobar2000

i'd downloaded foobar2000 a while ago (when i first heard of songbird) but was turned off by just how bland it looked (especially on Windows XP). after just having installed it again, i'm pretty happy. it seems to be pretty capable. i did spend 20 minutes getting it configured to my liking (added freedb tagger and audio scrobbler for last.fm posting) and making adjustments to the layout. i may look into some various themes...but am a fan, so far.

iTunes

of course, there's itunes. but (like winamp), it feels bloated and i can't stand that it keeps pushing quicktime on me and running services in the background. it probably does most of the stuff i want, though...to be fair.

...thoughts

anyone have any other suggestions?